Alec Hogg: Cape Town load shedding killer unpacked

Cape Town's mayor-in-waiting is not the kind of man who waits around. At 34, Geordin Hill-Lewis has already been in the thick of SA politics for a decade. And the promotions have come thick and fast. In 2011 he was sworn in as a Democratic Party MP, aged 24 years and seven months. For the past two years he served as Shadow Minister of Finance in Parliament.

Now the DA's mayoral candidate in its stronghold, Hill-Lewis is campaigning on the platform of ending load-shedding for the Mother City. In our interview yesterday, he referred to "kicking open the door" that opened a crack after Eskom supply shortages forced the ANC (despite ministerial resistance) to legalise licence-free power plants of up to 100MW. That's 100 times the previous cap.

Cape Town has a daily peak of 2 000MW of electricity. Each stage of Eskom load-shedding drops its supply by 100MW. Hill-Lewis says the city has 100MW in reserve through its Steenbras hydroelectric power set-up, so securing up to 500MW from independent producers would practically end load-shedding. Although Eskom's scale goes up to Level 8, highest yet applied was Level 6.

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